A practical investigation of identity theft vulnerabilities in Eduroam

Abstract

Eduroam offers secure access to the Internet at participating institutions, using authentication via IEEE 802.1X and secure forwarding of authentication data to the authentication server of the user's institution. Due to erroneous configuration manuals and a lack of knowledge on the user side, though, a big share of client devices lack the required root CA certificate to authenticate the Eduroam network, yet still being able to access the network. Moreover, deficient software implementations on client devices prevent users from the secure execution of the authentication process.In this paper, we present an attack that exploits this fact and uses the default behavior of wireless devices in order to capture authentication data. This MITM attack is performed in real-time. It is achieved using a modified version of hostapd, which exploits a compatibility setting of the widely used supplicant software wpa supplicant. It enables an attacker to authenticate users in EAP-TTLS/PAP and in EAP-TTLS/MS-CHAPv2 without the necessity of cracking the user password hash on the fly and thus without inducing suspicious delays. In a practical study with several hundred users we could show that more than half of the tested devices were vulnerable to the attack. Based on the results of the study, we propose countermeasures to prevent the attack and minimize the amount of vulnerable devices.

(In)Secure Configuration Practices of WPA2 Enterprise Supplicants

“…Techniques for attacking WPA2 Enterprise supplicants that are not configured appropriately are widely known (e.g., [16,2,8,11,7]). These techniques are not a weakness of the WPA2 Enterprise family of protocols: they are an obvious consequence of using those protocols without satisfying their basic requirements.…”

“…Satisfying this requirement is extremely important. Supplicants that are not correctly configured, i.e., that do not know the DNS name of the authorization server for the enterprise network, may be easily tricked into starting an execution of the authentication protocol with an evil twin, a malicious access point that broadcasts the SSID of the enterprise network (e.g., [16,2,8,11,7]). In most configurations the protocol execution will fail, because the evil twin will not be able to authenticate itself to the supplicant as required by WPA2 Enterprise.…”

Providing Login and Wi-Fi Access Services With the eIDAS Network: A Practical Approach

“…If one of the RADIUS servers in the hierarchy is down, this impacts the overall service. Identity theft vulnerabilities and MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attacks in Eduroam have been investigated in [26], along with some possible countermeasures. Other authors [27] proposed to enhance Eduroam security via a new trust hierarchy based on RA-DIUS/TLS [28], while Liu et al [29] proposed a scheme aimed to improve Eduroam stability and performance.…”

Easy-to-Deploy Wireless Mesh Network System with User Authentication and WLAN Roaming Features

“…In theory, the users do not connect to rogue APs if the supplicant checks the validity of the offered certificate of the authentiaction server. However, in practice, some older versions of wpa supplicant do not check the validity of the authentication servers' certificates [19]. Even if the supplicant can check the validity, some users might accept invalid certificates.…”